Kings Never Die
by iffiness
Summary: "He honestly, genuinely, truly didn't mean to do it. It just happened." One-shot in which Tony Stark accidentally took over the world and took nearly a year to even realize it. My salt filled dreams of what could've been in the MCU. This is cross-posted across FF and AO3
1. Chapter 1

_AN: Heeeeey, just a quick one-shot of salt fueled wishes. This is what I would love to have had happened in the MCU. Hope y'all enjoy it as much as I do._

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He honestly, genuinely, truly didn't mean to do it. It just happened.

It wasn't exactly _out of the blue_ of course, but it was close enough to a surprise that he felt no remorse in insisting he never realized it was happening. Hell, it took him nearly a year to even truly comprehend what he'd done that pissed the world off so bad this time. It took a rare moment with no pending meetings, sitting sedately with a full mug of steaming coffee, enjoying the plush and expensive Italian leather of his office chair in the relative silence of the compound in the early morning for him to realize what he'd done.

Or maybe it was the plethora of open news sites flitting across the screen in front of him that really did it for him. He'd like to think that it was all him though; that he realized it himself and through meditative introspection.

" _ **Tony Stark Rules the World."**_

" _ **All Hail Overlord Stark"**_

" _ **The Stark Empire - Expanded"**_

" _ **10 Reasons Why Tony Stark is a Total BAMF"**_

" _ **In Stark We Trust"**_

" _ **Out with the Old, in with the New - Bye-bye, Ex-vengers; Hello New-vengers"**_

" _ **Tony Stark - New SHIELD Director?"**_

The headlines were _insane_. But to be fair, he did approve of the Buzzfeed article. Mostly because the number one reason was that his ass was still the best ass in the world apparently. Forget all the rest of him: his technology, his numerous doctorates, the venerable army of robots at his command, the very loyal agents currently scurrying around his compound, and the Iron Man suit itself. His _ass_ was why he was a BAMF.

He was still chuckling to himself as he had FRIDAY call Maria Hill to his office. He'd had reservations about her in the past, what with her honor boner with Fury and the lot of them, but she did good work and he could appreciate that. Especially after everything that went down with the so-called _civil_ war. She took over with a ruthless efficiency upon his return and subsequent medically mandated vacation. He still barely understood the reasoning to that entire debacle, but she and Pepper made a hell of a terrifying duo. Sometimes he liked to imagine he could still hear the UN shaking in its boots after going toe-to-toe with the two of them. By the time he finally had clearance to get back into the game half the fun was over, but he was still needed to lobby personally for a few of their various goals. The Accords themselves were amended in record time honestly, and since then it's been relatively peaceful. Still no word on the status of his ex-teammates, but that literally wasn't his department. They had an actual department dedicated to tracking them and making sure they weren't getting into trouble. That still blew his mind sometimes.

"Dr. Stark?" Maria's voice called out from the open door, her knuckles gently rapping twice on the wood as she entered. She was dressed smart in a black pantsuit, and he couldn't help but to smile at the red and gold shirt layered under the jacket. The subtlety of it was a nice touch.

"How many times have I told you to call me Tony now? I know there's a tally somewhere. FRI?" Tony waved her in as he glanced up toward one of the cameras in the room, standing up himself to move around the desk and pull a chair out for her. It was unnecessary, but his mother did raise him with manners no matter what the rest of the world thought of him. As she took her seat and he moved back around the desk a holographic screen popped up between them with actual tally marks on it, three sets of four marks with a line through the center and a fourth set with just three marks. He grinned at it while leaning back in his chair, layering his hands on top of his stomach. "Eighteen times, Hill. You've made me ask you eighteen times to just use my name."

Her eyeroll was palpable and only made his grin grow more, but she visibly relaxed back into the chair as she got a feel for his mood. It had to be some sort of secrety-spy thing, Tony thought to himself, because literally no one else he called in ever judged the meeting by whether or not he was feeling playful. He'd even caught Fury doing that exact thing a few times in the past.

Actually, now that he was caught thinking on it he couldn't quite discern why they do it. "Why do you do that?" he ended up asking, throwing caution out the window in true Tony Stark fashion along with his brain-to-mouth filter. When she just raised a brow at him he let loose an exaggerated sigh, waving one of his hands through the air in a wishy-washy motion. "You know what I mean. The thing. Why do you all do that? The judge-y thing; the part where you sit all stiff until you decide what kind of mood I'm in. Is it a spy thing? I think it's a spy thing. Probably for manipulating people or something, right?"

Maria, for her part, just looked amused as he rambled on. "Honestly, Dr. Stark?" she asked him, and she was definitely baiting him by using the honorific again and he refused to take that bait. "It's not a spy thing. Or a manipulative thing. _Everyone_ does it. You're a powerful man, no one can deny that. And no one wants to piss you off, so you get the _judge-y thing_ because people respect you enough to not want to get on your bad side."

Tony narrowed his eyes at her in response, his nose scrunching minutely as he thought back on his last few interactions. Maybe they had. Maybe they hadn't. He really wasn't looking for it with the board of directors, or the investors, or the UN delegate, or the Council, or T'Challa, or… god, he had so many meetings this week. "Alright," he finally decided with a light shrug. It had merit to it at least, but he'd have to actually pay attention more to decide for himself. "Whatever. I'll say I believe you just so we can move on. I did actually have a reason for calling you here, y'know?"

Another raised brow from her and a slight twitch of her lips was all he got in return, but he was satisfied enough with those small tells that he'd amused her. Maria was a tough woman herself, but she'd loosened up around him more and more as time went on. "I was hoping you didn't just call me here to discuss people's reactions around you."

He rolled his eyes and sat up properly in his seat, folding his hands across the desk between them as he leveled her with a more serious look. The reaction was nearly instant as her own posture straightened, and he took a moment to revel in the thought that they knew each other so well now. It was like the eighth wonder of the modern world. "Why does the internet say I've taken over the world?" he asked her in all seriousness, flipping over the screen he'd been reading for the last hour for her to glance the headlines he had pulled up.

A much more amused smile danced upon her lips as she read them all, her eyes twinkling with something he almost dared to call mischief. "Would you like the list chronologically or alphabetically?"

He blinked in confusion at her words, leaning back once more to peer at her suspiciously. "Is this some sort of ploy of SHIELD's? Are Fury and Coulson about to pop out of my closet and shout " _Surprise!"_?"

"I don't report to Fury or Coulson anymore, and SHIELD is still struggling to regain its footing in the world," Maria informed him, as if it was the most obvious and easy thing in the world. Like it was just a well known fact to everyone but him apparently. Gazing at his ongoing look of incredulous disbelief on his face something in her softened, and that just confused him even more. "I report to _you_ , Dr. Stark. Just you."

"What?" It took him at least thirty seconds to formulate a response to this new information, and he had no idea what to even think of it.

"If I may, Boss," FRIDAY's softly lilting voice interrupted his frenzied, confused thought process in that gentle way only his AI's ever could, "I have concluded that Ms. Hill is speaking the truth, and have compiled information for you to review should you need to further prove her words."

It took him nearly a full moment more before he really comprehended what was going on, running through all the various scenarios and possibilities in his mind before he finally shook his head. "No. No, baby girl, that's alright. I don't need any of that. Thank you."

"Of course, Boss. And may I remind you of your meeting with the Accords Council in approximately one hour and thirty-three minutes?"

He nodded mutely to her in acknowledgment, still staring at Maria who was, for all the world, looking as if she hadn't just dropped a bombshell directly in his lap. It was _terrifying_. The implications of what she'd said… "Oh, my God," he finally gasped out, leaning back to the desk and placing his elbows on it and his head into his hands. "Oh, my God. I've taken over the world. You're all loyal to just me now, aren't you? Every last agent I pulled out of the fire when SHIELD fell. And then- _and then_ -I went on and found new super-powered individuals to form a new Avengers team. And I _lead_ that team. And I changed the Accords themselves. And the shape of international politics altogether. And I expanded SI into global protection. And brought the Iron Legion back. And…"

"And you're the single most powerful man in the world?" Maria supplied, not so helpfully when he trailed off. She smiled smugly at him across the desk as if he wasn't having the more shocking revelation of his life. Like he wasn't shaken to his god damn core at the implications of what was going on. "Honestly, boss, there's been a betting pool going on for _months_ waiting to see when you realized this. I just won five hundred bucks. PR and Legal are gonna be pissed."

Tony only stared at her as she spoke, silently mouthing _what_ one more time as he let it all sink in. He could see the _how_ it happened, and now that he was thinking on it he could even get the timeline down. He'd inadvertently taken over the world.

"Wasn't this the kind of thing you were supposed to stop?" he finally squeaked out lamely, wincing at the exasperated look she leveled him with. "I mean, what happened to "Tony Stark: not recommended"? Wasn't there a whole file SHIELD had dedicated to stopping me if I ever went this far?"

"There was, not that you were supposed to know about it," she educated him primly, but he barely had it in him to feel chastised, "But it was wrong. That entire file." Maria leaned forward to grasp one of his hands on the table, and he stared mutely down at their hands. Honestly, he didn't think his morning was going to get quite so confusing. It had been good, calm for once, but he had sort of brought this one upon himself. "You're a good man, Tony. A much better man than anyone ever gave you credit for."

His eyes quickly jumped from their hands to Maria's face, the mounting, overwhelming mixture of emotions welling in his gut at the honest-to-god _genuine_ expression on her face. "Who are you and what have you done with Maria Hill?" he ended up asking her, half out of desperation to break the tension in the room, and half out of the paranoid thought that maybe something really had happened to her.

She pat his hand gently before pulling back and sitting properly once more, smiling at him in a way he'd not seen before. Or maybe he hadn't noticed. With the way the morning was shaping to be, he was leaning more toward the latter. He'd apparently not noticed a lot of things right under his nose up until now. "So," she began, her tone slipping into professionalism with an ease he envied, "I think we should move forward to cut this off at the head, Dr. Stark. The rumors will only get worse, considering they're mostly true, but I think we can spin it to make it seem less like world domination and more like a large, peace-keeping organization. Which is what we really are, after all." And as if to add insult to injury she pulled up the multiple files PR and Legal had already been working on, sending them to his email with a flick of her wrist. "We've got a lot of options available here, but a press conference with a statement of intent might be all we need."

He nodded along as she spoke, relieved for the easy out from all the emotions that had been swirling in a whirlwind around his mind. "Yeah. Okay. If that's what you all want?"

"It's the easiest path to take to ease any suspicions, but Dr. Stark, what do _you_ want?"

Tony took a moment to look over the information displayed before him, one hand tapping a light, calming pattern against his sternum as he thought about it. He definitely hadn't expected his day to turn into something so monumentally life-changing for him, but honestly? Today was no different than yesterday. He had the same amount of power and responsibility then. The only difference was now that he was aware of it he could actively work to change it, to mold it into something he could be proud of. That they could _all_ be proud of. And he knew just how to do it.


	2. Maria Hill

_AN: Just some afterthoughts on the previous chapter, a bit extra that I had to write and get out of my system. It's been a nice therapeutic exercise for me overall, and I hope y'all enjoy!_

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"I want it public. I want as much transparency as safely possible, and where it's not I want it on a release schedule. Sort of like what the government already does, but we'll work out specifics on ratings and everything another time. We're not gonna become just another shadow organization here."

Maria smiled and settled into her chair, bringing her tablet up to begin taking notes as Dr. Stark slipped into his role as smoothly as expected. He was a man who had it all, who was always in the spotlight, but people still ignored the parts of him that made him truly important. The focus was always on what made him dangerous; the things that meant he was an asset to be controlled, but that was never right, was it?

Anthony Edward Stark was born for this. He grew up around the things that they had all taken for granted. He'd seen Howard Stark and Peggy Carter during their prime as a child. He'd learned and observed them for years. It was true that both Howard and Peggy had tied a thousand knots of red tape around Tony to keep him from SHIELD, to protect him from the shadowy world they both knew, but they had to have known it was inevitable and that one day he would be drawn into their world. Whether he wanted to be or not, Tony had been destined to get to this point.

She still remembered the meeting at SHIELD when Fury had made the decision to start bringing Stark into the fold. She'd disagreed vehemently back then. She wasn't the only one. In fact, there was so much opposition that it took months for them to come to an agreement, and only then did it happen because Stark emerged from the ashes of Afghanistan with a suit of armor and a fervor unlike anything he'd ever shown the world before. In a series of powerful moves over the years that followed Stark repeatedly proved them wrong and showed his worth, despite the pushback on all sides as time went on. He was a lone wolf, a loose cannon they had no hopes of controlling conventionally, and then they sent in Romanova.

They were all lucky that Stark was made of tougher stuff. The years of emotional manipulation they'd all willingly put him through would have cowed lesser men, but once again Tony flew himself out of the ashes and came out the other side smelling like roses. He always pulled himself through, stood himself up, dusted the dirt off his shoulders, and just kept moving on.

She admires him for his level of perseverance. Even after everything with the Accords-with Siberia, though Dr. Stark had yet to confirm anything that had happened there-the man still got right back up and put himself back into the game.

She respects him for his power. He took Stark Industries from a national, million dollar weapons manufacturer and created an international, billion dollar tech empire. He created a suit of highly advanced armor in a cave in a desert, and has since only improved upon it. Those are all the powers he gave himself, but his natural powers? Any room he walks into he becomes the center of, as if he is the star and they the planets, and he barely even notices.

She gave her loyalty to him because of his kindness. His innately gentle soul, the heart buried deep within the armors he's crafted to protect himself from them all. The beauty of his heart and mind that doesn't seem to be able to stop itself from taking in more and more until, inevitably, something happens to break it again. He's had to pick up the pieces alone for years, slowly welding them together until he finds the strength to stand up and do it all over again.

Watching him now though, as he continues to ramble on about all of the plans he's apparently had for _years_ like an overgrown child getting ice cream for the first time? She refuses to ever let him have to suffer alone like that again. She'll stand by his side for however many years it takes until he's fully healed from it all; until he trusts her as much as she trusts him now.

She isn't the only one, either. He's attracted a whole new breed of hero to him; like moths to a flame they all came in, one by one, falling in love with Tony Stark and his golden heart. She'd watched them all suspiciously for a long while, but now she knew their loyalty is just as true as her own.

Spider-Man was the most obvious and easiest to read of them all. The kid idolized Stark; put him on a pedestal and into a position that he'd never been put into before, and it suited him well. Tony Stark as a mentor, as a _father_ , was a treat to see. The kid grounded him, helped him find a part of himself that he'd never known was missing, and kept him honest. Tony had hardly touched liquor outside of a social setting in months now, and if anyone asked Maria she would absolutely put the honors all on the baby spider.

Dr. Stark approaching the Defenders was an interesting week for her. It would've been simpler if he'd not insisted to get involved personally, but once he gets an idea in his head she knows it's a pipe dream to pull it back out. He'd refused her insistence that he speak with Rand first and went straight to Harlem in the most expensive car he owned, parked it next to an old barber shop, turned his comms off, and went right on in like it was just another day. Whatever happened next must've left an impact, because less than a month later Luke Cage showed up with Rand and Jones in tow to discuss the new Avengers initiative and what part they would, if any, be able to play in it. Murdock came in not long after he crawled out of whatever hole he'd been hiding in, and the rest was history. Dr. Stark went out of his way to ensure they had as much freedom to move as possible, to not mess with the status quo they already had, and to give them any support they ever needed.

Perhaps the most surprising was when Hope van Dyne showed up on her own, the Wasp suit under her finely tailored business attire, demanding an immediate meeting with Dr. Stark. He'd been more than accommodating for her, of course, but it wasn't as easy at first as the others had been. They had a lot of contracts to draw up, in respect to their own companies, and whatever had happened behind the closed doors of that meeting must've been eye opening for them both because for the first time since their creation, Pym Technologies and Stark Industries launched a cooperative investigation into water filtration systems across the globe. Now the two of them are near inseparable every time they're in a room together.

Deadpool showed up at one point, and has continued to show up since. Maria honestly had no idea when, exactly, but it happened and she wasn't going to think too hard on it. Crazy he may be, but he's saved Dr. Stark's life several times now, and she was grateful for it. He'd even signed the Accords after a chat with Tony at a hotdog stand.

She was unashamed to say that Carol Danvers was her favorite of Dr. Stark's adoptions. A strong military woman who takes no bullshit, has a mean right hook, and a protective streak a mile wide. More than once Maria has called upon Captain Marvel to assist with some of Dr. Stark's riskier ventures.

All in all, Dr. Stark was more protected, with a better support system than ever, and Maria was satisfied with it. They were still growing, still pushing forward into new territory, but it was good work. She ended her days, more often than not, actually feeling like she was making a difference now. And if she got to watch Tony Stark basically skip out of his own office to go to the first meeting of his day, filled to the brim with energy barely contained under his skin? Well, she's allowed to indulge in the notion that maybe, just maybe, the world is going to be okay after all.


End file.
